Tag Archives: Department of Transportation

When President Obama’s 2017 budget was released in early February, it was clear that a key focus of the administration’s final year was to drive a smarter and more efficient government through IT. Key sections of the budget confirmed what has been evident for some time now: that “[t]he Administration has embarked on a comprehensive effort to fundamentally improve the way that the Government delivers technology services to the public,” through means of “recruiting top technologists and entrepreneurs to work within agencies on the highest priority projects, leveraging the best processes to increase oversight and accountability for IT spending, and ramping up Government contracting with innovative companies.”

Next month will mark a year that FITARA has been in effect. Yet, Chief Information Officers (CIO) and their executive staff continue to wrestle with how to maneuver the legislation in order to effectually align compliance with individual agency mission. As a result, the last year has been a testing ground of sorts for many CIOs, where they have learned what works what doesn’t.

The first report cards measuring how well agencies are meeting their FITARA requirements was released this week and the results were not very good. According to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee the GSA and the Department of Commerce are ahead of the curve, receiving a grade of B, but most agencies earned a grade of D, no agency merited an A. Despite the dismal interim report, there are still many reasons to be confident that agencies will be able to meet FITARA requirements both for the next deadline on December 31st and as they update their self-assessments in April 2016.

A recent federal cloud computing event underscored several themes we’ve recently highlighted here on ModernGov. The Federal Cloud Computing Summit brought together cloud subject matter experts from the federal government and academia, and featured visionary panels about topics ranging from cloud strategy to cloud success stories to a look ahead at what the future of cloud computing might look like. The insights shared by many of the panelists at that event echoed the sentiments Software AG Government Solutions thought leaders Chris Steel and Chris Borneman recently shared about the future of the data center and IT modernization.